February 22, 2015

Is there a book you reread regularly? What makes it re-readable? Is it because it always stays the same -- or because it doesn't? (Stephen Marche's article "Centireading Force: Why Reading a Book 100 Times Is a Good Idea" may shed some light.)

I asked the lazyweb (a term I learned from Charlie Jane Anders) and got some interesting answers. This week I'll focus on fiction.

The Magewars books by MacDonald and Lee. Kickass female starpilot and spooky foe. They're not that well-conceived but my "need" to reread them convinced me at the time that I was looking for my "people" and the interactions of the people in the story with the epic background was a "fix." (I feel like I just filled out an application for nerd classification)

Franny & Zooey. The first re-read was dramatic! I had forgotten she was an actress! Also, I got all the love and humor inside the family. Now it is like a reminder to BE ALIVE and loving, as all is fleeting. Read without ceasing.

I reread Wuthering Heights every few years. I fell for this book at exactly the right time. I was twelve and full of intense "feelings" and had the fortune to visit Haworth, the Brontes' home, that same summer. No one loved that book more than I did. I remember asking my 7th grade English teacher if we could study it and she said it was s girl book. Deep sadness and incipient Feminism grew from that! I told her Huck Finn seemed like a boy book and refused to like it till reading it again in my twenties> It has now become another book I reread nearly yearly, partially because I teach it and partly because it is the greatest American novel.

Huck Finn and Moby Dick. Usually not cover-to-cover. I just open them up anywhere and read whatever I land on. I used to do that with Tropic of Cancer too. What those three books have in common is probably having no plot, or anyway not being plot driven.

Please don't laugh. I read The Bridges of Madison County every year or so. It's a quick read and I love the message that love never dies...

Sometimes a Great Notion. Read it first almost 35 years ago and I reread it every few years. Some fascinating imagery. I usually learn a bit about myself.

Mists of Avalon - I was just coming into feminism when I read the book for the first time. And it was like a revelation to me - what a story could be - how it could be profoundly different when told from a woman's perspective. Before, I would've told you my favorite author was Shakespeare or John Irving - but Mists changed all of that for me. I go back and read every few years - its not the most literary story, but it takes me back to that time in my life where all of these possibilities just opened up for me. Plus, it was the book I was reading when I first visited England and my longterm love asked me to marry him. So there's that.

Every summer I reread To Kill A Mockingbird to remember what a summer in the south is and because every time I find something new to love.

Most of Jane Austen; Trollope's Palliser series; and Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander series. (I skip Emma, which I don't love.) I think I go back to them all for the same reason: they're the books that most closely resemble my socially awkward reality. I love the moments when the characters realize they've been reading a situation all wrong--like when Anne realizes that Captain Wainwright thinks she's in love with Mr. Eliot, or when Mr. Palliser (one of the great heroes of literature, IMO) finally talks to his wife.

The five Lauren Laurano mysteries by Sandra Scoppetone. Great lesbian detective fiction and a love song to New York City along the way.

Pride and Prejudice. First read around 1986. Reread every few years or so, maybe because I have an emotionally distant father and have always been attracted to that type. The difference between reading-then and reading-now is that I'm aware of it and Mr. Darcy is maybe a hair less attractive than he was to me at 16. But only a hair.

True story: I have re-read Pride and Prejudice like five times because I think it is the one I haven't read. Then I realize, no, it is Sense and Sensibility that I haven't read, but by then I am really into Pride and Prejudice and so I just finish it. Or is it Sense and Sensibility that I've read five times? I can never remember...

Happy All the Time. It's a book from the 70s. My uncle gave it to my mom and my aunt and it eventually came to me. It kind of changes for me as I get older, but I think fundamentally all the people are basically kind and smart and want to live decent lives and do the right thing. Also, there are just some really funny quirky characters, like Misty Berkowitz's cousin Stanley, who types really really fast.

I periodically re-read Gravity's Rainbow. But just the first page. And then I realize there's no way I'm ever reading Gravity's Rainbow.

Other titles mentioned: Ivanhoe, A Prayer for Owen Meany, The Lord of the Rings, Cryptonomicon, Discworld, Jane Eyre, The Good Earth, Anna Karenina, The Screwtape Letters.

February 08, 2015

In this week's New Yorker, Hilton Als reviews the stage adaptation of John Lindqvist's "Let the Right One In," saying: "if the performers had conversed in Swedish (with English supertitles) it would have created an effective difference between the audience and the play, adding to the general strangeness of the proceedings while remaining true to the story's roots."

So, Als thinks that some stories are meant to be foreign to us, to make us a little uncomfortable. His comment made me think of my recent experience reading the English translation of Norwegian author K.O. Dahl's The Man in the Window (2008). As I read, I was frequently distracted by odd bits of syntax. At the time, I thought these were errors of translation, but now I wonder if some of the strangeness of the syntax was deliberate. Either way, if Als is right, the mistakes may have added to my overall enjoyment of the novel.

For example, the text contains a number of odd uses of the word which: "His gaze fell on the front door which Ingrid, his wife, would open in a little over two hours..." (p. 9). Or: "She studied herself in the mirror on the wall, adjusted her long hair, plunged into her handbag for a lipstick which she ran across her lips" (p. 136). This commaless which appears almost once a chapter.

The little frisson one gets from noticing funny syntax is nothing, though, compared to the MORAL OUTRAGE one gets when one sees the bizarre words the translator uses in place of said. We all know it's okay to use said over and over in dialog -- but no one told translator Doug Bartlett, it seems. Or maybe it's Dahl who falls all over himself finding ways to avoid using the Norwegian equivalent of said. Characters in The Man in the Window mumble, mutter, murmur, stutter, stammer, shriek, grumble, whisper, and whinny. In one case, a character "mumbles" a 24-word sentence (p. 73), which seems rather excessive -- wouldn't someone have interrupted and to say "Please speak up"? In another case, we get mumbled three times in four sentences, as on page 51:

"The whole floor to themselves," Frolich mumbled. "The widow -- Ingrid -- must have broken down," Gunnderstrada mumbled in a low voice. Then Karsten Jesperson appeared in the doorway. "Come in," he mumbled softly, as though frightened someone would hear him.

January 25, 2015

Darkhouse Books is seeking stories for “Destination: Mystery”. A collection of mystery and crime stories set in locations popular for vacations. We are looking for stories residing on the cozy side and that highlight the attraction and appeal of the setting – though please, no puff-pieces. We prefer stories with locations where average people vacation, including sandy resorts along Lake Michigan, log cabin lodges in the Adirondacks, quaint, coastal towns on any coast, and legions of other places forever enshrined in generations of family photo albums. Since we want the locations to be recognizable, stories should not be set prior to mid-twentieth century. The submission period is now open and will remain open through 11:59pm (PST), March 31st, 2015. We are seeking stories in the 2500 to 7500 word range, though if it’s truly knockout material, we’ll consider any length. The anthology will contain between twelve and twenty stories, depending on the overall length. Authors will share equally fifty percent of royalties received. We accept MS Word .doc and .docx files. Submissions must be in standard manuscript format. Links to formatting guides are available here. Previously published work will be considered, provided the author has the power to grant us the right to publish in ebook, audio, and print versions, and that it has not been available elsewhere more recently than January 1st, 2014. Submissions may be sent to submissionsATdarkho usebooksDOTcom. Please leave “Submission-Destination" in the subject line and add the name of your story. Andrew MacRae Darkhouse Books

January 11, 2015

As Curator of Special Collections at Colorado College, I frequently receive catalogs from rare book dealers with unusual themes. This week I got a notice from Garrett Scott about his latest list:

"42 uncommon and interesting items dealing in murder and mayhem and destruction both natural and unnatural. Items include a few nice 19th century murders (or topical verses on same). Further doom and/or destruction includes prairie fires and destructive snowfalls, Romantic deaths, a young girl in the coal pits, the romance of the Rosenbergs, glances at funeral practices and other perhaps morbid preoccupations. Sexual misconduct and neurotic belching have each been included as well."

December 28, 2014

The Ghosts of My Friendsis an autograph book with a twist. Published in the early 20th century, it's a near-blank book meant to be used for sideways signatures to be turned into "ghosts," that is, humanoid (ghostoid?) shapes representing the signers.

Colorado College students reading 18th century literature were in Special Collections recently, and at one point we were talking about identifying people by their handwriting. I ran and got The Ghosts of My Friends since it suggests that a person's handwriting is that person in a profound way.

The "ghosts" pictured here were made in 1916 from the signatures of Polly McKeehan and Geo. B. McDonald.

There are about 40 copies of The Ghosts of My Friends in U.S. libraries. Each one, of course, would contain different ghosts. Maybe there's a copy in a library near you! Or you could purchase a copy from abebooks.com for $30-500 (the most expensive one for sale today includes the "ghost" of actress Sarah Bernhardt).

December 14, 2014

The Farm, a new stand-alone novel by Tom Robb Smith (Child 44), is the kind of book you should start when you have a couple of days off, because you're not going to want to put it down until you're done. Do you like untrustworthy narrators? Do you like family secrets slowly unfolding? Do you want to find out if the narrator's mother killed her best friend when they were teenagers?

Ona Simaite, a librarian at Vilna University, used her position to aid and rescue Jews in the Vilna ghetto. Entering the ghetto under the pretext of recovering library books from Jewish university students, she smuggled in food and other provisions and smuggled out literary and historical documents. In 1944, the Nazis arrested and tortured Simaite. She was then deported to Dachau and later transferred to a concentration camp in southern France. She remained in France following her liberation.

November 09, 2014

My library recently acquired a copy of Harry Potter and Leopard Walk Up to Dragon, an unauthorized Harry Potter knockoff in Chinese with illustrations stolen from Disney and other sources. It may be of interest to Harry Potter fans, students of Chinese, and anyone interested in copyright and intellectual property; it may also be of interest to Tolkien fans, since in this novel Harry teams up with a wizard named Gandalf and goes after a magic ring and a dragon. Don't believe me? See this jaw-dropping excerpt.

I can't say for sure how J.K. Rowling feels about these bootlegs (and these, and others), but I'm guessing it might be like this:

November 02, 2014

In honor of Halloween, I present spooooooooooky x-ray images made by Colorado College professor Florian Cajori ca. 1896. These are probably the first x-ray images west of the Mississippi.

What you're seeing are a spooooooooky hand, a spoooooooky rat, a spooooooky bird wing, a spooooky foot in shoe, and a spoooooky pair of scissors. The hand and the foot belonged to CC professor Frank Loud. Colorado Springs photographer Horace S. Poley developed and printed the photographs and labeled them. He did not use any form of the word "spooky."

For more information, see: J. Juan Reid, "Florian Cajori: First X-ray Photographs in the West," Colorado College Bulletin, February 1982, pp.12-13.

October 26, 2014

Darkhouse Books seeks stories for an anthology of historical crime and mystery fiction. For the purpose of this anthology we are defining historical fiction as, those works set more than a few decades prior to the present and written by someone without direct experience in the setting and events of the story. But should a truly superb story happen to stray from the above strictures and cross our threshold, we would happily consider it.The submission period is now open and will remain open through December 31st, 2014. We are seeking stories in the 2500 to 7500 word range, though if it’s knockout material, we’ll consider any length. The anthology will contain between twelve and twenty stories, depending on the overall length. Authors will share equally fifty percent of royalties received.

October 12, 2014

I got invited to Steamboat Springs, Colorado this week to give a presentation at the local public library. I was kinda dreading the four-hour drive each way, but it turned out to be a lot of fun. I listened to a new music, looked at the beautiful view, and enjoyed the hell out of the fact that none of the many traffic jams were northbound while I was northbound, nor southbound while I was southbound.

The presentation went well, the weather was perfect, I hiked five miles and saw an excellent waterfall, and then I found out that I'd be reimbursed at the official IRS rate of 56 cents per mile, so it feels like I made money on this deal!

October 05, 2014

Last week I was so excited about Anna Katherine Green that I left out an important codicil: she was the first American to write a mystery novel, not the first earthling. I apologize. Thanks, Esau Katz, for pointing this out. And thanks, Josh Getzler, for not pointing out that you'd already pointed this out on an earlier post.

According to Marie T. Farr's entry on her in American Women Prose Writers, 1870-1920 (Dictionary of Literary Biography volume 221), Green disliked the term "detective novel" and preferred "criminal romance." Farr references Alma Murch's "The Development of the Detective Novel" (1958), which claims that Green introduced a number of detective story tropes, including the series detective, the "rich old man, killed when on the point of signing a new will; the body in the library; the dignified butler with his well-trained staff; detailed medical evidence as to the cause and estimated time of death," and more. This suggests that without Green, we wouldn't have the name of this blog!

September 28, 2014

Did you know that the author of the firstfirst American detective novel was a woman, Anna Katharine Green?

No, I'm not saying the first woman author of a detective novel was Anna Katharine Green. I'm saying that the first author of a detective novel was Anna Katharine Green, a woman.

IKR?!

Shouldn't we have heard of her before? Why haven't we heard of her?! Is it because of the patriarchy? Is it because her books aren't widely read any more? Bit of both, I'm guessing, but let's look into it.

She was born in 1846 and published The Leavenworth Case, the first detective novel EVER by ANYONE anyone in America, in 1878. You can download the full text of the novel from the Gutenberg Project for free.

September 21, 2014

In the 1980s, a man named Stephen Blumberg stole thousands of books and manuscripts from American libraries, amassing a collection worth millions of dollars. (For the full story, see his Wikipedia entry or the "Bibliokleptomania" chapter of Nicholas Basbanes’s A Gentle Madness.)

Colorado College was one of the many stops on Blumberg's cross-country book-stealing tour. He stole at least two books from us. One of these was no big deal, a 1930s pamphlet on Bent’s Fort, easily replaceable. The other, however, was quite rare: Henry Villard’s The Past and Present of the Pikes Peak Gold Region, published in 1860. Currently, it's held in only a handful of U.S. libraries and isn't available from any dealer. The FBI valued the CC copy, in its crummy modern binding, at $10,000.

Blumberg may have stolen as many as a dozen books from our library, but only these two were recovered. Library staff worked with the FBI to get the books back. It was particularly complicated because Blumberg not only removed or covered over library ownership marks from books, he also added false library marks. So, for example, a book stolen from Harvard might get a University of Michigan bookplate slapped onto it, and then a “withdrawn” stamp on top of that.

As was his wont, Blumberg used his own saliva to remove the CC bookplate from our copy of this book. Nevertheless, the FBI tracked it down, and it was returned to CC after Blumberg's 1991 trial. He spent almost five years in jail. Since 1996, he has been convicted twice more for similar thefts.

Because researchers often want to see the book that Blumberg stole, but can't always remember the name of it, we now state in our catalog record that our copy of the Villard book was "temporarily part of the Blumberg Collection." It's a good book to bring out with classes when we want to talk about the ethics of book collecting, and always sparks an interesting discussion.

September 14, 2014

When I was hired as Curator of Special Collections at Colorado College, we had about thirty books and boxes on a shelf labeled "cataloging snags." I ignored these as long as I could, but finally one day I gave the shelf some attention.

As you might expect, I found mostly 20th century books in non-Roman writing systems -- books in Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, etcetera. There was also a box of old coins, including, gasp, a penny from the 1950s, worth perhaps as much as 15 cents to an expert collector. The shelf was full of junk, in other words. Nothing "special" for Special Collections at all.

And then there was this.

I opened it up.

Let me try to approximate the sound I made at this point. It was something like this:

aahhAAHHAAHHHHHH?! urghhghhrraahhhhrghhfhfhhhhghhh.

The book is the first published English translation of Aristotle's Politics, printed by Adam Islip in London in 1598. It has the bookplate of English scholar Sir Sidney Lee (b. 1859), editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. He wrote a little bit about Aristotle and a lot about Shakespeare.

We cataloged it right away. How it ended up on the cataloging snags shelf, I don't know. It wasn't terribly difficult to catalog -- it has its title page, and the Library of Congress owns a copy. It's in beautiful condition and is one of the more valuable books we have in the library. It's now in our temperature- and humidity-controlled high-security vault. I bring it out regularly to show to classes in Classics, Philosophy, Political Science, and Book Studies. And I'm thinking about making the kitty cat on the title page the mascot for Special Collections.

August 31, 2014

In the wake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Swedish mysteries are all the rage. Not that they aren’t good, but they may be getting more attention than thrillers set in, say, Honduras. Anything with a Swedish connection seems to have a little extra oomph right now. Cecilia Ekbäck is, in fact, from Sweden, but she now lives in Canada and wrote this book in English, which probably makes it easier to present to a U.S. audience. Historical novels are also hot, and Wolf Winter wins on this front too.

Set on the frontier of Swedish Lapland in 1717, Wolf Winter includes a murder, but it goes beyond to study human behavior under extremes. In 18th century Scandinavia, the struggle with winter and just finding food to make it through until spring was brutal. Maija has moved from a coastal town to a rugged mountain with her husband and daughters. This sparsely-settled area holds just a few families, and the closest town is miles away. Almost as soon as they get there, one of the daughters finds a dead body; the story of how and why this man was killed unfolds throughout the novel. Against a backdrop of the politics and culture of the time, Ekbäck explores of how people act under pressure, whether political, social, or religious. The culturally distinct Lapps play a role in the story, as does the state-sanctioned church and even the King of Sweden. In the end, Maija and most of the other settlers survive the harsh winter, but not without much suffering, both physical and psychological.

At times I was reminded of Halldor Laxness’s Independent People and other novels that bring home the fundamental toughness of rural life in Scandinavia. I can’t evaluate the authenticity of Ekbäck’s recreation of Sweden in 1717, but I found it all eminently believable. I enjoyed both the historical detail and the characters. The author’s spare style fits well with the reserved people and harsh landscape she describes. This title is due out in January 2015.

Gwen Gregory is the resource acquisition and management librarian at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She reads books the way many people watch TV.

August 24, 2014

Last week I delved into the history of the term mystery. A friend pointed out that the term detective fiction was probably first, and this turns out to be true. The OED has examples from the late 19th and early 20th century for the terms detective story, detective fiction,detective novel, and detective film:

1924 19th Cent. May 718 We note that the plot of a detective novel is, in effect, an argument conducted under the guise of fiction.

It appears from the OED that the term detective started out as an adjective, not a noun. In the 1840s, one might be a detective policeman or a member of the detective police, the detective service, or the detective force; not until 1850 would one simply be a detective.

Oh, and by the way, critics were complaining about mysteries almost as soon as they were written. The OED gives only one example of the term detectivist:

1892 W. Wallace in Academy 24 Sept. 261/1 It may be hoped that Dick Donovan is the last of the detectivists in fiction.

* the exact title by Green is unclear. The OED calls it XYS; Google Books calls it XYZ; WorldCat calls it XYA.

August 17, 2014

I got curious this week about the origin of the word mystery. It turns out it's a lot older than I expected, and at the same time a lot more recent. Depending on how you look at it, it's more than 2000 years old, or less than 100.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the Latin word mysterium had a solely theological meaning in the Classical world. It's then found in early Christian texts as early as the 4th century. The first known use of the word used with a secular meaning is in a 14th century bible: ca. 1384, Bible (Wycliffite, E.V.) (Douce 369(2)) Dan. ii. 27 "And Danyel answerde byfore the kyng, and saith, 'The mysterie whiche the kyng axith, the wise men and the witchis and dyuynours..mown not shewe to the kyng.'"

Jump 250 years and we've got a meaning closer to the word we use in this blog: "In weakened use (chiefly ironic or humorous): a puzzle, a conundrum." The example the OED gives for this general usage is "[blank] is a mystery to me," and the first known use is from 1629: "J. Ford Lovers Melancholy iv. i. 64 Aret.: What should this young man bee, Or whither can he be conuay'd? Sophr.: Tis to me a mystery, I vnderstand it not." (Why the u in understand is a v in this example, but not the u in young, is a mystery to me; I understand it not.)

It's not until much later that we have a documented use of the word as a kind of fiction. The OED's earliest example comes from none other than Raymond Chandler, in a letter he wrote in December of 1949: "The mystery and 'tec are on the wane." (You can see the whole letter in context here -- he also thinks that science fiction is a flash in the pan!) The next use in the OED is from the New Yorker in 1969: "Linda was on the next bed, reading her mystery." (Turns out this is John Updike, though the OED doesn't say so. See it in context here.)

August 10, 2014

Janet Evonovich is up to number 21 in the Stephanie Plum series, and I'm happily surprised to say that she's still making me laugh. The books are all basically the same -- Stephanie gets into trouble as a bail bondsman, cars are destroyed, Lula says funny stuff, Ranger and Morelli are hot, and Grandma Mazur is feisty. Terms such as "doodah" and "knicky-knacky" abound. Nothing really bad happens, and there are pastries. Fine by me!

I would like to lodge one complaint, however, and that's the boilerplate descriptive stuff that shows up in each book. We're on number 21, people. We don't need to be told that Lula used to be a prostitute or that Stephanie has brown hair, or at least not in such a clunky, expositive way. Even if a reader is new to the series and starting with number 9 or 14 or 21, that reader will catch up without help.

August 03, 2014

You guys!! There's a book about mystery books that take place in the book world!! This is probably the most perfect thing ever for the Hey-There's-A-Dead-Guy librarian Sunday post.

It's a limited edition, pricy book (200 copies, $75), but if ever there was an audience for such a book, it's us, right? The best part, to me: it contains 130 full-color photographs of "rare or especially interesting dust jackets and covers."

The Oak Knoll page says the publication year is 2013, but this page says the publication date is July 2014. I think it probably just came out, because it isn't in any libraries yet.

July 27, 2014

In 2009, a small press called Ghost Road published my young adult novel The Wandora Unit. I got paid a tiny, thrilling advance. The book sold a few copies and got reviewed in Bitch, and then Ghost Road quietly went out of business. In 2012 another small press wanted to reprint it, but then they went out of business, too.

Maybe that's okay. I made so many mistakes in that book. Just mistake after mistake after mistake. Here are a few:

The book doesn't really have a plot. It's about high school poetry nerds making a literary magazine. There's friendship and love, but nothing really happens.

I was way too attached to my interpretation of things that occurred in actual real life, as though readers would care one fig what song was playing at the dance or what color my boyfriend's hair was.

When I did occasionally try to pump up the story with bits of fiction, I did a bad job of it, contriving stupid conflicts and surprises.

I didn't read the manuscript aloud until after it was a full-fledged published novel. DUH. IDIOT.

By the time the book came out, fifteen years after I'd written it, my clever postmodern format with multiple-voiced fragments was nothing particularly new in YA fiction.

Things I did right:

I started the novel when I was a teenager, and wrote most of it before I was 24. So it's a pretty authentic young voice, not some kind of pretending-to-be-young thing with faked-up slang.

I included poems by fourteen different actual teenagers. Contacting them to get permission to use their work was probably my favorite part of the whole writing/editing/publishing experience.

Maybe now that I've admitted these mistakes publicly I'll be able to move the fuck on. But I doubt it. If I knew how to fix the book and make it a marketable YA novel, I probably would never have written it in the first place.

July 20, 2014

I was first drawn to The Art of Secrets by James Klise (Algonquin, 2014) because it takes place in Chicago and the author is a librarian. Once I started reading, I found that Saba Khan, the teenage heroine, lives just a mile or so from my home in the Rogers Park neighborhood on the north side of the city. I was quickly drawn into the story, which blends elements like teen angst and learning to get along with arson and art theft.

Without revealing too much of the plot, here’s a quick rundown. Saba’s family’s apartment burns in an arson-caused fire and they lose all their possessions. Her fellow students at the private school where she is on scholarship want to have a benefit auction to help the family, and one donated item turns out to be quite valuable. Chaos and crime ensues.

The text is almost all in the form of first person narratives from different characters, including Saba, her parents, others students, and teachers. Some are police or newspaper interviews, some are journals entries; there are even a few text messages. It took me a bit to get used to this, as well as to the different fonts used to express handwritten entries, but I got into it fairly quickly.

Klise manages to touch on quite a few interesting issues, especially cultural, religious and socioeconomic diversity as exemplified by Saba and other students. The mystery is not particularly complex, but it did keep me guessing until the end. While the crimes committed are serious, there’s no violence or drugs involved. The Art of Secrets will be engrossing for most young adult readers, and quite a few grown-ups as well.

Librarian side note: there were comments in the text about a student using the library catalog terminals for email. Only a librarian would bring this up, so I know the author is the real deal.

Gwen Gregory is the resource acquisition and management librarian at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She reads books the way many people watch TV.

July 13, 2014

The stories of why I became a librarian are manifold, but I realized today that probably the real reason is air conditioning. Colorado Springs doesn't get anywhere near as hot as other places I've lived, but it's been hot enough for the last few days that I've been appreciating the coolness (temperature-wise) of Tutt Library, and remembering how nice it was to work in libraries in the summers in NY, MA, PA, and NC.

Rare books and manuscripts, you see, are supposed to remain at a fairly stable temperature and humidity. Not all libraries have the same rule, but here at Tutt we try to stay between 61 and 65 degrees Fahrenheit and between 41 and 44% relative humidity. My office isn't quite as cool as the collections areas, but it's still way cooler than outside. And every time I enter our collections area I get a nice blast of coolness, kinda like when I'd find any excuse to go to the walk-in refrigerator when I worked at a pizza shop in high school.

July 06, 2014

If you don't know about this website, you should -- it's really cool, especially the read-alikes section, which is small but spot-on.

Stop, You're Killing Me includes a diversity index pointing readers to series with detectives who aren't straight, white, and/or able-bodied, along with indexes for lots of other things. Lucinda Serber and Stan Ulrich run the site. It's a work in progress, of course, and it isn't perfect (why isn't Jonathan Lethem's Gun, with Occasional Music listed in the science fiction section?), but SYKM is doing so many things so well. It's well worth a look, and you might want to sign up for their newsletter, too.

June 29, 2014

Joseph Green and Jim Finch. Sleuths, Sidekicks and Stooges: An Annotated Bibliography of Detectives, Their Assistants and Their Rivals in Crime, Mystery and Adventure Fiction, 1795-1995. Scolar Press, 1997.

I can't believe this print source was ever written, published, or sold, and yet all three things happened. This is a book of ... how can I even explain it ... it's like if an obsessive-compulsive fan of detective fiction had endless money and time to create something like Casaubon's unfinished, doomed "Key to all Mythologies" in George Eliot's Middlemarch. Except this got finished and wasn't doomed!

The book has sections for detectives, authors, books, sidekicks, and stooges. The detectives get most of the book's real estate (pages 43 to 748). Each name is accompanied by a brief description, basic personal information (nationality, sex, type, and location), a list of "sidekicks" and "stooges" (i.e. adversaries), a short biography of the author who created the detective, and bibliographical information. The rest of the book is mostly cross-references, so if you know the name of the stooge you can get to the detective.

Why would anyone use this book in the age of Google? I don't think anyone would. Yet there's something wonderful in the fact that it exists, that Green and Finch actually got paid (presumably) to create this crazy thing. And it's still in print, with a price of $200! Its Amazon rank is about 6,400,000 at the moment, which may be the worst rank I've ever seen, not that I've made a study of such things.

June 22, 2014

Despite being published in the nascent days of the internet, this book would still be of great use to anyone writing detective fiction. I can even imagine such a person keeping this book by her bedside, dipping into it or reading from cover to cover, gleaning, along the way, basic information on the history of the police in the U.S. and England, mystery tropes such as the gentleman thief and the locked room mystery, and the origins of terms like red herring or whodunit. The entries are signed and contain references for further reading.

I spot-checked Wikipedia and found the information in the Companion generally superior. The book scoops Wikipedia by four years on the etymology of whodunit, with a reference to a usage in 1930. It's got carefully researched entries on topics like the spinster sleuth and the slicks, which would be difficult or impossible to find online. Most important, the Companion is slated to writers. The exact kind of information a writer might need on smuggling, sex crimes, or bribery are in the Companion; I found no online source with succinct, writerly overviews on these topics.

June 15, 2014

As you may know, I'm the resident librarian at Dead Guy. Now and then I like to flex my library muscles, and this is going to be the first in a series of three posts looking at reference works on detective fiction. My plan is to compare some pricy print sources to the information we can now get for free on Wikipedia and elsewhere.

Bruce F. Murphy's Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery (St. Martin's, 1999) is a single-author work with entries on authors, titles, characters, and themes in detective fiction. It lacks neutrality, making it, to my mind, less of an encyclopedia and more a work of criticism. There are facts here (short biographies, occasional incomplete bibliographies), but the thrust of the entries is critical. Sue Grafton gets a rather nasty overview (when Kinsey Millhone goes undercover, she "sounds like a character from Happy Days"; the writing is "vapid" and "bland," and the marketing of the books is "cutesy"); Robert B. Parker gets similar treatment (his later books are "simple" and even "canned").

Murphy's Encyclopedia is a good book. It's intelligent and well-written, and I can see why libraries all over the country have acquired it. But I'm not sure why anyone in 2014 would spend $75 on it ($65 for the paperback) when more and better factual information is readily available online, for free. The 1999 edition of Murphy misspells Janet Evanovich's name (Evanovitch) and lists her birth year as unknown, while Wikipedia knows all about her; Murphy's entry for Agatha Christie is under 1000 words, about a tenth of the size of the Wikipedia entry.

In the early days of the internet, we librarians cautioned researchers against depending on Wikipedia. It had no editor! It was written by amateurs! It could be changed at any moment, by anyone! Of course, these things turned out to be strengths, in the end, and while you can't always trust everything in Wikipedia, it's frequently got more and better information than print sources.

June 08, 2014

Last year at around this time, I confessed my "dirty submission secrets." My statistics last year turned out to be okay, though of course there were way more rejections than acceptances. My numbers are definitely worse this year.

In 2013, I submitted 100 bundles of poems, poetry comics, and short stories. I didn't intend to submit a perfect 100, but now my terrible percentages are easy to calculate, so I've got that going for me, which is nice.

21 journals accepted my work, which makes for a 21% acceptance rate. I received 63 rejections. 16 journals never replied. Of the 21 journals that accepted my work, two folded, so my percentage is more like 19%. That makes this easily the worst year since I started keeping track.

My bright idea to send poetry comics to the New Yorker may be to blame for some of the drop in my statistics. Also, I sent out way more submissions than usual (100 bundles instead of 60-70), and to some pretty high-prestige places, because hey, I'm the real thing, right? Well, apparently the high-prestige mags mostly didn't think so. Once again, I learned the same lesson I'm always learning: the really satisying interactions with editors and other writers aren't necessarily connected with prestige. If I were in charge of the poetry world, for example, Menacing Hedge would have a reputation on level with the Kenyon Review. But I'm not.Who is in charge of the poetry world, anyway? I'd like to have a word with that person.

Oh, I forgot the best acceptance of all, not included in my statistics because it was for a full-length manuscript, not a story or a group of poems. Red Hen Press, which published my last book, accepted a new collection of poems, tentatively titled "Suicide Hotline Hold Music." The book will have comics in it! I'm pretty excited about that! So maybe I should consider this a bang-up year after all.

June 01, 2014

If you're unfamiliar with the great work of writer Richard Laymon you owe it to yourself to find a book or two and take the plunge. Laymon, the author of over 50 mystery, thriller, horror stories follows the traditions of absolutely no one. In fact, suffice to say, that any 21st century writer of mystery and horror without understanding Laymon is cheating the genre by ignoring a wonderful and true talent.

In Laymon's 1994 mystery In The Dark, librarian Jane Kerry finds a note in an envelope sitting on her chair at the circulation desk just before closing one evening. "Jane," the only word on the sealed envelope lurks in front of her as she turns and notices. As she glances around the library to see who may have left the note, she is interrupted by several last minute patrons checking out last minute books for the evening. Finally, once the library is closed, Jane is able to reach down, open the letter and read what it says. "Look Homeward Angel," it says along with a further clue or two as the book and the mystery begin.

Jane is subsequently led, via these notes into more and more dangerous tasks while receiving gifts from The Master of Games, doubling after each mini-adventure. (the first envelope contains $50) If you know Richard Laymon, the tasks become more and more difficult, risky, ambiently and overtly sexual and what lies ahead is good old fashioned, pre-cell phone to get you out of a tough situation, mystery, horror suspense,with spot on dialogue and absolutely not, your grandparents' cheerful Miss Marple adventure.

Once you read Laymon, assuming you'll accept exactly who he is, as a writer, you will crave more. Like the great works of Alfred Hitchcock, innocent people get tangled in most unusual ways. My promise to you is that a treasure hunt of your own will ensue as you begin looking for more and more Laymon books. And in a funny way, the prize and pleasure seems to double, as does Jane's fortune, with every read.

Jon Khoury is the Executive Director and CEO of Cottonwood Center for the Arts. Although he has a knack for being a people person, the people he meets in books are his favorite company.

Note from Jessy: Thanks, Jon, for recommending this book to me. I found it compulsively readable, couldn't put it down and finished it in two days. Here's my favorite sentence in the book: "The pistol went nicely into the big, loose pocket on the right front of her culottes" (p. 296). (Not a sentence you'd find in many books today.) I was disappointed that Jane didn't use her library and information skills more, however. Her librarianhood seemed to be for titillation rather than for plot. On the other hand, how titillating are culottes? Well, at least she was wearing something at the time. For great swaths of the book she's at least partly in the buff.

May 25, 2014

In a recent article in Salon, Susie Meister talks about her experiences on reality TV shows and her love/hate relationship with reality TV. Her piece is interesting to me because of what she says about the gender dynamics of reality TV, but here's the non-gender-related part that keeps reverberating in my mind:

"the cast is banned from bringing books, music, television, phones, cameras, computers, games and other forms of entertainment that would distract from cast interaction."

Well ... NO WONDER they all go batshit crazy and turn on each other! No books for weeks? I'd be crying, shaking, screaming, ripe for cult kidnapping.

Meister was on Road Rules and The Challenge, which may be different from my beloved Top Chef and Project Runway, but when I think about it, I'm not sure I've ever seen any of the cheftestants or designers reading books. I guess I always figured they were reading off-camera, for obvious reasons. But maybe they, too, aren't allowed books? I know the chefs can't have cookbooks, duh, and the designers can't have pattern books, duh again. But what about just books to read? I mean come on.

May 11, 2014

Remember the contest about the mystery marginalia, with a prize of $1000? The mystery has been solved!

Daniele Metilli, an Italian computer engineer, has been named the winner. Working with a colleague who is fluent in French, Metilli identified the script of the marginalia (a particular type of 18th Century French shorthand) and translated some of the text. And guess what, this story is particularly library-oriented, because Metilli is studying to be a librarian, and says libraries are the best places for finding mysteries to solve!

“If I didn’t have access to online sources such as Google Books, the Greek Word Study Tool of the Perseus Digital Library and the French corpora of the CNRTL, I probably wouldn’t have won. What great times we live in!” - See more at: http://news.uchicago.edu/article/2014/05/05/mysterious-150-year-old-writing-rare-copy-homers-odyssey-identified#sthash.opikcfal.dpuf

identified the mystery script correctly as a system of shorthand invented by Jean Coulon de Thévénot in the late 18th century. - See more at: http://news.uchicago.edu/article/2014/05/05/mysterious-150-year-old-writing-rare-copy-homers-odyssey-identified#sthash.opikcfal.dpuf

identified the mystery script correctly as a system of shorthand invented by Jean Coulon de Thévénot in the late 18th century. - See more at: http://news.uchicago.edu/article/2014/05/05/mysterious-150-year-old-writing-rare-copy-homers-odyssey-identified#sthash.opikcfal.dpuf

identified the mystery script correctly as a system of shorthand invented by Jean Coulon de Thévénot in the late 18th century. - See more at: http://news.uchicago.edu/article/2014/05/05/mysterious-150-year-old-writing-rare-copy-homers-odyssey-identified#sthash.opikcfal.dpuf

April 27, 2014

The University of Chicago library is offering a $1000 prize to anyone who can identify and translate some highly unusual marginalia in an early printed edition of Homer's Odyssey. The best guess, so far, is that the notes are 19th century French shorthand. They appear in the chapter in which Odysseus visits the underworld. Paging Dan Brown! Dan Brown, you are wanted in the office ... so we can provide you with the inspiration for your next book.

April 20, 2014

Walter Kirn is a respected contemporary writer, author of novels including Thumbsucker and Up In The Air. He is also widely published in magazines, including Time, GQ, and Esquire. Kirn’s new book Blood Will Out is being promoted as the next great true crime story, right up there with In Cold Blood. I beg to differ. While it focuses on Christian Gerhartsreiter, a man of many aliases perhaps best known as Clark Rockefeller, it isn’t really the story of this German who came to the U.S. and remade himself as an American aristocrat. There is another book all about that, The Man in the Rockefeller Suit by Mark Seal. There was even a Lifetime TV movie about Gerhartsreiter. Rather, this is the story of Kirn’s relationship with the man he knew as Clark Rockefeller and how being a writer affected the situation.

Kirn first encountered Gerhartsreiter/Rockefeller in 1998, when Kirn agrees to take a rescue dog from Montana to the latter in New York. From the beginning, Kirn admits, to himself at least, his interest in meeting a Rockefeller, both as a writer in search of characters and out of a fascination for the rich and famous. After a rough journey, Kirn delivers the disabled dog and thus begins a years-long friendship. The two men are in contact off and on for many years. In 2008, Clark Rockefeller is arrested in a child custody/kidnapping case, his real identity is discovered, and he ends up in prison. In 2011, he is charged with the 1985 murder of Jonathan Sohus in California. This trial took place in 2013, with Kirn in attendance. He used it an occasion to reflect on his relationship with the man he knew as Clark Rockefeller and considered the testimony of the witnesses through the lens of his own experiences. Kirn made friends with other writers at the trial and even took his own teenage daughter to court one day. He was really into it. After the guilty verdict, he visited his old friend in prison a number of times. Even after hearing all the testimony, and knowing so much about all the cons and lies, he could see how easy it was to be manipulated by him.

The strength of book Blood Will Out isn’t in psychological insights about sociopaths or forensic evidence about cold murder cases. It is really about Kirn’s relationship with this totally off the wall person and how that worked out. Like most people, Kirn generally believed what Gerhartsreiter told him about his life, maybe taking things with a grain of salt but never imagining that it was all totally fabricated. In fact, he dismisses the first reports of his friend’s false identity in 2008, until it becomes fully clear that it was all a lie. Kirn examines his thoughts and feelings, ranging the gamut from being impressed at Rockefeller’s modern art collection (which turned out to be all forged) to betrayal upon the revelation of his true identity and full-on anger at some points during the murder trial. Along the way, Kirn shares bits and pieces about his own life, including his family and divorce. He frequently refers to stories of self-invention like Fitzgerald’s Gatsby and Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley, believing they inspired his friend’s efforts. This is an interesting exploration of both our fascination with celebrity and how we react when faced with someone who breaks all the rules of social convention.

Gwen Gregory is the resource acquisition and management librarian at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She reads books the way many people watch TV.

April 13, 2014

You guys! Some thieves tried to steal a pair of ruby slipper replicas from a Staten Island hotel! The best part is, there were three of 'em, a woman and two men, so it's almost as if Dorothy, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow were to blame (I'm figuring the Cowardly Lion would have been too cowardly to participate.) Mystery writers, wouldn't this make a great heist story, with a few modifications? Someone please write that novel. Thank you. And thank you, Jezebel, for calling my attention to this theft.

April 06, 2014

Someone has been leaving coded messages inside books at the Weldon Library at Western University in Ontario, Canada. As of March 24, 2014, 18 notes have been found. Professor Mike Moffatt has images of all the notes at his blog, and a reward is offered to anyone who can crack the code.

March 30, 2014

A mysterious book artist has been leaving book sculptures around Edinburgh since 2011. They're beautiful and fragile and made from books. The artist still has not broken anonymity, despite a whole exhibition of the sculptures and a book about them.

March 23, 2014

For the past ten years or so, my library colleagues have been reviewing books at our book review blog, Bookends. I thought it might be fun to gather all the mystery and mystery-ish book reviews together here. Some of these are by recent guest blogger Gwen M. Gregory. Other reviewers are McKinley Sielaff, Diane Westerfield, and Steve Lawson.

March 16, 2014

We track bestselling books obsessively: weekly, daily, even hourly or minutely on Amazon sometimes (guilty!). Yet we hardly pay any attention at all to library lending. Why not? I suppose because money isn't involved, or not as directly involved, but still, it seems worth thinking about.

Library Journal's annual survey of U.S. public libraries shows that in 2013, libraries lent mysteries more than any other kind of book. And this has been true for years, with slight fluctuations. From the survey:

"Among fiction’s various genres, mystery remains king, though its grip slipped somewhat in 2013, when 95% of respondents reported it as one of their top five fiction circulators; in 2012, its share was 99%.

Interestingly, the survey shows that libraries in urban and rural areas lend more mysteries and thrillers than libraries in suburbia. I would never have guessed that.

March 09, 2014

As a librarian at a research university, I am lucky enough to attend the American Library Association’s conferences once or twice each year. These gatherings of thousands upon thousands of librarians from all kinds of libraries are a major market for publishers and resellers of all types of books, as you can imagine. One thing they do to entice librarians is to give us lots and lots of free books, mostly prepublication copies. What could be better than free books before anyone else gets to read them?

My last few times at the conference, I have collected more and more of these books. It started when I got a few young adult and children’s books for my nieces and nephew. Once I started collecting those, I saw more and more titles that I thought they might enjoy. I love a good young adult read myself. Then I started perusing the adult books from many of the same publishers. There are so many interesting new novels by authors from all over the world. Would this new title be a breakout hit? I’d have to read it and decide for myself. So I saddled myself with at least a dozen paperbound prepublication copies to lug home on the plane.

At the conference in January 2014, I broke down and took all my collected loot to the convenient temporary post office set up as part of the conference, mailing the books home. Once I started this, there was no stopping. I mailed another box to myself each day the book exhibits were open, and still ended up with a dozen more books in my suitcase. My nieces and nephew have piles of fresh reading material and I have dozens for myself. You may be wondering, when will I actually read all of these? Even though I’m a fast reader, it will take a while. I have to give up on some if they are just not working for me. However, that disappointment is more than made up for by the thrill of finding a great book and then being able to pass it on to a carefully selected reader friend, hoping that they will enjoy it as I did. This is the librarian art of reader’s advisory, which I don’t practice in my day-to-day work so it’s even sweeter to be able to do it for my friends and family.

I did pick up a few mystery and thriller titles at the conference. So far, I have enjoyed Dominion by C. J. Sansom, well-known author of the Matthew Shardlake mysteries set during the reign of Henry VIII. Dominion is an alternate history set in the Britain of 1952, if the UK had surrendered to Germany in 1940. Germany has a tight grip on the UK, with plenty of SS, Gestapo, and other Germans stationed there. The Russian Front has become an ongoing guerilla war. The British Resistance, led by an aging Winston Churchill, is smuggling a scientist out of the country, and German agents, working with the British government, aren’t far behind. I am fascinated by Britain during World War II, possibly fueled by watching Foyle’s War on TV and reading Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis, time travel stories that take place during the Battle of Britain. Sansom’s novel is an extension of that stressful time period, adding elements of cold war spyplay, in which the British are pushed further and further outside their comfort zone by the Third Reich. Fans of 20th century alternate history as well as cold war spy dramas will enjoy this one.

Gwen Gregory is is the resource acquisition and management librarian at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She reads books the way many people watch TV.

March 02, 2014

Others (Kelli Russell Agodon, Nin Andrews, Kate Gale) have written (and drawn) far better than I ever could about the travails and wonders of AWP. The first time I attended AWP, when it was in Denver in 2010, I thought, well, I've done it and now I don't have to do it ever again.

I have attended almost all the AWPs since then. This will be my fourth. Every time, I think, I must stop doing this. It's awful. It makes me feel horrible.

But ... my friend(s) are going. And I have a new book, or I'm trying to have a new book. And most of all, what if I miss something? An opportunity, an amazing piece of writerly gossip, a MOMENT?

Like, if I hadn't gone last year, in Boston, I would have missed having super-terrific barbecue with the guys from sunnyoutside press. And if I hadn't gone to the one in 2012 in Chicago, I would have missed hearing my friend Daniel M. Shapiro telling Nikki Giovanni "Thanks for everything," which, in context, really made no sense. (Nor would I have the memory of standing on a corner in a clump of writers and getting doused in puddle water by a passing car.) If I'd skipped my first AWP, in Denver, I wouldn't have gotten to gasp with delight at meeting Sherman Alexie at the West Wind bookfair table. Speaking of the bookfair, I always come home with at least a dozen great new books.

Still -- it's a lot of money and mental anguish for the occasional moment of awesomeness. There are too many people, and it's too noisy, and nobody can really pay any attention to anyone else, and the whole thing makes you want to coil into a little ball and rock back and forth chanting "I am me, I'm still me, I'm the same person I've always been." I never write a word of any worth during AWP. I'm a gibbering mass of french-fry-seeking patheticness. Maybe I won't go in 2015. Seriously. I might not.

February 23, 2014

Oh my gosh, there was a new Tom Robb Smith book -- Agent 6 -- and I somehow missed it when it came out in 2012. I've just started it and can't put it down.

As I wrote in 2009 for my library's blog: Tom Robb Smith is a brilliant freaking genius. The setting for his thrillers Child 44 and The Secret Speech is post-Stalinist Russia, a world of justified paranoia for everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, from powerless citizens to KGB officers and back again (sometimes within the course of an hour).

Child 44 takes place in a world where the State claims murders don't happen; thus, a serial killer can thrive. Leo Demidov, a former state security officer, puts himself and his loved ones in grave danger just for suggesting there's a killer out there, much less trying to gather evidence and put an end to the crimes. (A confession: I am a bit weak of heart when it comes to stories of children in danger. Child 44, which early on contains a riveting scene of a family near starvation, was almost too much for me. But you'll enjoy the second book more if you read this one first.)

The Secret Speech, which hinges on a real life document by Krushchev apologizing for Russia's past mistakes, is mind-blowingly good. Leo now has infinitely more to lose; you will gasp at the lengths he goes to to protect his family. Honestly, my heart beat so fast during some of these chapters that I had to get up and walk around the room to calm down. Each character is complicated; good and evil people and deeds mix and match throughout. Yes, it's a popcorn book, but a hell of a good one.

February 16, 2014

I think The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons may be my favorite Lawrence Block book in a long time. It's a bookish book, with lots of references to books and reading; Bernie Rhodenbarr, the narrator, runs a bookstore when he's not burgling, and he's thinking about all the things bookish people are thinking about right now in 2014: digital books, what books are, why we read them. This particular book, perhaps more than others, references multiple other mystery authors: Rex Stout, RIchard Stark, Ed McBain.

I've been reading Block since I was a kid (see my previous posts on the topic here and here) and it's been fun to grow old with him. The Burglar books are fairly wholesome, as crime novels go -- there may be a murder or two, but they happen fairly quickly and bloodlessly. In this book, Block seems to be consciously aware of what kind of writer he is and what kind of crime-solver Bernie is. There's a passage toward the end where Bernie's friend Carolyn tries to convince him to turn away from the dark side, and Bernie points out that when Dan Marlowe's character Earl Drake turned wholesome, the books lost their bite. He's right: we need Bernie to be a burglar, or he'd just be blah.

February 09, 2014

The genre (if it is one) of poetry comics is hard to define. As guest-editor of the February 2014 issue of the online literary magazine Snakeskin, I chose 21 poem-like combinations of text and image that were at least partly hand-drawn.

Poetry comics are not necessarily technically proficient, nor are they necessarily funny or lyrical, but they can be all three.

When I put out the call for poetry comics submissions for Snakeskin, I didn’t know what would happen. I was enormously pleased at the variety I received. Becky Cooper’s “Map Your Memories” project suggests that we all have poetry comics in us just waiting to come out. Maybe you should make some!

February 02, 2014

My writer friend Bruce Bentzman recently published a three-part essay about being burgled in the online magazine Snakeskin (part 1, part 2, part 3). I thought Dead Guy readers might be interested in some of the real-life procedural details of the case.

Bentzman left his apartment unlocked for about fifteen minutes while he did some outside work. When he returned, he discovered his laptop and a few other things had been stolen. Bentzman and his “more significant other,” Ms. Keogh, called the police. Meanwhile, they soon learned, the burglar had already begun using the credit card to purchase gift cards from local shops.

Bentzman was especially upset about the less-monetarily-valuable thefts: his mail, his journal, and three beloved fountain pens including a Sailor Bamboo Susutake similar to the one pictured at right. (I occasionally receive handwritten letters from Bentzman; it’s clear from looking at them that he cares deeply about ink and penmanship.) He followed the credit card trail of the burglar, hoping to recover whatever he could from nearby trash bins. He says:

In the trash at the Rite Aid in Yardley, I found three envelopes that were not mine. It appeared that someone had paid bills and thinking they were mailing them, inadvertently tossed them into the blue recycle bin mistaking it for the blue mailbox that was only a few feet further. I picked them out, noted the return address, mailed them correctly, and called Mr. N. of Yardley to reveal the error. Mr. N., who sounded like a dear man, 92-years-old, was thoroughly astonished and grateful. So was I. I felt I had been afforded the chance to restore some goodness into the world, countering the damage caused by the shithead burglar or burglars, only I never found my mail.

Bentzman soon learned that two women, likely the burglars, were under arrest for other crimes in the neighborhood. He filled out a form requesting to see the crime report for his burglary:

A week later, I received a letter from the Township Manager informing me that my request has been denied pursuant to the Pennsylvania Right to Know Law Section 708 (b)(16). 708 (b) are the exceptions. (16) has many parts. Which parts are pertinent to me? One that stood out was, “(iii) A record that includes the identity of a confidential source or the identity of a suspect who has not been charged with an offense to whom confidentiality has been promised.” But maybe more pertinent was, “(v) Victim information, including any information that would jeopardize the safety of the victim.”

Then there was (vi), which is subdivided into five parts. “(A) Reveal the institution, progress or result of a criminal investigation, except the filing of criminal charges. (B) Deprive a person of the right to a fair trial or an impartial adjudication. (C) Impair the ability to locate a defendant or codefendant. (D) Hinder an agency’s ability to secure an arrest, prosecution or conviction. (E) Endanger the life or physical safety of an individual.” That last one, would my inquiries place me in danger?

Bentzman found out as much as he could about the accused women. The more he learned, the less likely it seemed he would ever recover his pens or his journal (and indeed, as of this writing, he hasn’t gotten them back). He learned that the two women were heroin addicts and repeat offenders, and that he would be in attendance at the hearing for Anne Bambino, the woman who had used Ms. Keogh’s credit card. What was it like to see her up close?

The courthouse was unimpressive, a one-story white stucco building. It looked insignificant, as if the law did not merit any special honor, held no particular virtue. When Ms. Keogh entered the stark lobby of the building, I pointed to the window in the wall where she needed to sign in. We then sat together and waited, wondering if we would recognize Ms. Bambino when she arrived.

I expected to recognize her. After all, I had seen her photograph. I had seen the pictures taken by surveillance cameras. I had seen her mug shots. There are several as she has been arrested multiple times. I had seen her Facebook portrait. She would not have recognized me or Ms. Keogh. Whether it was she or her associate who rifled our apartment, we had no photographs of ourselves on the walls. And there she was. She was easy to recognize. She arrived under guard and in chains.

She wore a maroon prison suit under a winter jacket. A chain dragged between her ankles. Her wrists were also chained and it extended to a steel loop on a thick leather belt. Even in this sad state, she was more attractive than I expected. It was disconcerting to see this small, pleasant appearing woman in such determined restraints.

Ms. Keogh and I took a seat in the last row of the small courtroom. I looked at Magisterial District Court Judge John J. Kelly, Jr. I knew him! Was I to call the kid I wrestled back in our Neshaminy High School gym class “Your Honor”?

It hardly mattered that we came to the hearing. There was no confrontation. We were not called to speak. Ms Bambino was offered to sign a waiver. It wasn’t that she was pleading guilty, but she was not contesting the charges and was having the case combined with other charges that would involve other courtrooms.

They placed the waiver on the judge’s bench for her to sign. It was too high for the small Ms. Bambino, only 5’3” and her arms restricted by chains. She rose on her tip toes to sign. One of the officers of the court said she was looking well. It caused a charming smile to arise across her face and I heard her pleasant voice. As I made it out, she was admitting that despite prison life she felt she was doing well. Then it was over and they led her away.

We left the courtroom and Detective Nicastro discussed the matter with us. He told us about Ms Bambino. She had been married, but it wasn’t known if she was separated or divorced. I asked if she had any children, but he didn’t know. I asked about my stolen pens. Detective Nicastro said that when the burglars realized they were just some pens in those little sacks, they probably threw them out.

It was hard to be indifferent to whatever happened to Ms. Bambino. I was angry with her, but with all the years she will be incarcerated, it would be terrible enough; I could not bring myself to wish her more. What is the value of my pens compared to several years of her life wasted in prison? That day at the hearing, seeing this meek blonde incongruously shackled and fettered, I felt sorry for Ms. Bambino. I am relieved the decision isn't mine to make.